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I know, I know. It’s been a while since I posted. Betcha thought I forgot about you. Or about health. Or being healthy. Not at all, my friends. I’ve been working on walking the walk, as they say, and forgot about talking the talk. The holidays, winter and spring have been a lot of fun, honestly. So fun that I did occasionally lame out on my health. I went a little nutso with coconut ice cream, for instance, and hard cider with a Fireball chaser. I was a little lax about exercising. And I paid the price with a little winter weight gain and a few sugar-induced migraines. But I also skied and did some rock climbing, and dusted off my elliptical machine. So we’ll call it a wash.

But now it’s spring – the time of renewal. Of starting over. Of green shoots bursting from the ground. And of a million vows to start exercising and eating right again. I don’t know why New Year’s Eve is considered resolution time – everyone I know re-starts in the spring.

This lovely pasta salad is a nice spring renewal offering. I was inspired by a recipe in a health magazine. Mine includes organic brown rice and quinoa pasta (gluten-free), grilled salmon, olives, a LOT of spinach, red onions, and a simple dressing of olive oil, lemon, toasted sesame oil, tahini (sesame butter) and tamari (wheat-free soy sauce). Oh and garlic and sesame seeds. Mmm. It was so good it was hard to stop eating it. Give it a try!

Sondra’s Salmon Pasta Salad

What’s in it — add or subtract whatever sounds good to you, it’s your salad :-)

Me and the cookie monster are like that (holding up my thumb and index finger with almost no light between them). I was even a little sad when he declared cookies a “sometimes food”. I mean, I agree with his message. But I think he succumbed to industry pressure…

So when I went gluten- and dairy-free, not to mention low sugar, cookies were a hard thing to sacrifice. I poured over GF, healthy cookbooks and websites to find satisfying treats. Some were failures, but some are so good I forget they are “healthy”.

This house favorite was adapted from the delicious Babycakes Covers the Classicscook book, using their Oatmeal Cookies recipe as a base. I switched out some of the flours to ones I keep in the house, left out the xanthan gum because I don’t love it and you don’t really need it in this kind of cookie, switched the sugar for Stevia, and added some good stuff like chocolate chips and peanut butter. I think it’s better for my tinkering.

I use sugar-free, gluten-free chocolate chips. Lily’s has good ones. They are a little expensive, but as Cookie Monster said, these are sometimes food. I used a Lily’s bar in the batch pictured above, chunked up, ’cause I was out of chips. Works just as well!

Can’t have peanuts, or baking for a school with a no-peanuts policy? Use almond butter, it adds similar richness.

Ready to try it? Here you go!

Oatmeal Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter cookies recipe

Ingredients:

1 ¾ cups Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose Gluten-Free Baking Flour

1 cup Stevia

1/2 cup Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free Oats

¼ cup almond meal

2 tablespoons ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup melted refined coconut oil

½ cup unsweetened applesauce

2 tablespoons vanilla abstract

½ cup peanut butter (or almond butter, or whatever you like)

½ cup sugar-free, gluten-free chocolate chips

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper and set aside.

I’ve never been into those cheery, inspirational posters people hang on their dorm rooms and office walls. You know the ones, with a kitten clinging to the branch of a tree and the words “Hang in there!” across the bottom. Or “TEAMWORK” scrawled under a bunch of guys rowing a boat. Because, you know, they gotta row in the same direction, like a team. Ahem.

But I am a fan of Post-it® notes. Thank you Dr. Spencer Silver and Art Fry for making them possible. Anyone who has ever been in my home or office, and sometimes even my car, has seen a rainbow of notes containing shopping list, passwords, directions, and tasks.

Nowadays people put all that on their phones, but old habits die hard and my sticky note habit started in the pre-phone era. Hard to believe I’m that old, I know.
So when I was looking for a way to stay on the right track with my diet and exercise goals, I stayed in my comfort zone. My wheelhouse, if you will.

I went right to my little buddies and asked for some help.

Little friendly messages strategically placed throughout the house remind me to eat less sugar, eat more nuts, and to move my butt. And while some days I just gaze right past them, over time I think they’re helping. Looking at them every day, the messages have seeped into my brain.

I’ve always loved sleep. Like, really loved it. I’d sleep for ten or eleven hours a night, regularly. Or until my mother came in and opened the blinds. At least on weekends and summer break. During the school week, and later work week, I’d stay up reading until eleven or twelve, and then struggle to wake up in time for the bus.

What I didn’t realize was that my excessive sleeping was my body’s cry for help.

Sleep is super important. It helps sweep away waste and repair cells and muscles. It helps our brain clean up and repair. It allows our heart and lungs to rest. But most people can do all that in 6-8 hours. I needed 10.

I eventually learned that I was, in fact, sick. All the time. My food allergies were messing up my whole system. When I finally stopped eating the bad stuff and recovered, I needed less sleep. Funny, huh? And when I slip and eat some bad stuff now, I pay for it the next morning. Or the next couple of mornings.

What if you have the opposite problem? What if you can’t get to sleep? What if you sit there staring at the numbers on your alarm clock, watching them change every sixty seconds?

I’ve been there too. Much less frequently. Usually the night before something big. An important presentation. The first day of a new job. Meeting someone important. An early morning flight. These all mess me up.

If this happens to you occasionally on the night before a big day, you’re in good company. Its nerves, plain and simple. If this happens all the freakin’ time, you need to do something about it. Without sleep, you’re kind of screwed. It’s a form of torture, right? Lack of sleep can mean memory loss, lack of concentration, reduced reaction times, decreased performance, and mood swings.

You’re sleepless nights could be caused by poor food choices, using stimulants like caffeine and (I’m sorry to say) chocolate, your mental state, a lack of physical activity, too much screen time, and electromagnetics, which sounds a little woo-woo but trust me, there’s something to this.

I got all excited writing a presentation for a sleep talk, and I created my own 5 Steps to Better Sleep.

Examine medications for sleep warnings. Take the stimulants early in the day, and the ones that say “don’t operate heavy machinery” near bed time.

Racing mind? Write problems down—and then put them aside. Still racing? Try a daily journal. Get it all out!

STEP 2: LISTEN to Your Body

Go to Sleep When You’re Truly Tired. Don’t make yourself wait until a certain, later bedtime if you’re dead tired. Go to bed early. Waiting it out could make you overtired, and then you’re done for. Like a toddler who misses her nap and gets all cranky and won’t fall asleep.

Don’t Be a Nighttime Clock-Watcher. If you cannot sleep, get out of bed and go do something else for a bit. Maybe have a snack, some protein and carbs. Then try again.

Use Light to Your Advantage. Keep it very dark at night and expose yourself to light right when you wake up. Make sure your alarm clock has red numbers, they don’t register as light in your brain.

Keep a Consistent Sleep Schedule. This trains your body, and mind.

Note how you feel when you wake up – if you’re not refreshed, you’re not getting enough sleep.

STEP 3: EAT well

Avoid Caffeine, Alcohol, Nicotine, Excess Sugar and Other Chemicals that Interfere with Sleep

Balance Fluid Intake. Get your main water in earlier in the day, and just take sips after dinner. That way you won’t have to get up to pee in the middle of the night…

Lighten Up on Evening Meals. They can be stimulating, and the need to digest a big meal can lead to an upset stomach. Eat your bigger meals at breakfast and lunch.

Get Proper Nutrition. If you’re not getting enough fiber, or essential minerals, that’ll mess up your system too. And too much of the bad stuff can mean you need more sleep than you think to recover.

Take probiotics. They’ll help your digestion, which will help your sleep.

Detoxify with fresh juice, turmeric, seaweed. Getting out the bad stuff reduces the need for regeneration.

STEP 4: EXERCISE

Promotes restful sleep.

But… cortisol activates the alerting mechanism in the brain. Exercise almost every day, but do it earlier in the day – at least three hours before bed.

Nap Early—Or Not at All. If you nap too late in the day, or nap too long (an hour or more) it robs your ability to sleep later. Keep your naps short, or wait and give yourself a better chance of sleeping later.

STEP 5: POWER Down

Reduce screen time before bed. Your TV, laptop, tablet and smart phone send a lot of information per square inch into your brain. A lot more than you can process, often. It’s very active information. Declare a curfew on screen time, at least one hour before bed. Read a book, listen to music, do a puzzle. Something in the real world.

Reduce electromagnetic exposure. This sounds a little crazy, but think about it. Your wireless network, your cell phone, your cordless phone – they’re all throwing out electromagnetic waves all over your sleep space. We don’t know for sure that they are screwing with our heads, but we don’t know for sure they are not. If you having troubles sleeping, what have you got to lose? Turn ’em off for a few nights and see what happens.

Look for “leaking” lights. Those twisty florescent bulbs are especially leaky. Take them out and use LED lights, and see if that helps.

Now here’s the weird thing. The owner, James, said that drinking it would open my heart. He told me about a lady who brought her growler back and said she needed to take a break from the Reishi tea because it was making her cry too much.

That was a little scary, to be honest. But I liked the idea of an open heart, and I like to think that pain is purifying, and good to get out of my system. Better to feel it then let it fester and hide. So I gave it a try.

And you know what? It did make me cry. But not in a bad way. Not in a “woe is me” or “boil the bunny” kind of way. More in a “poor little lamb for past hurts” and “my life is so full of goodness today”, gratitude-laced sort of way.

Want to know what’s in your heart? Pour in some Reishi mushroom tea and see what comes out. It may surprise you. And fortify your body while it’s at it. Two for one!

I’ve been preaching a lot about the wonders of fresh squeezed green juice. I’m loving the effects of juicing on my body and mind, but not so much on my wallet. And to my shame I did not have a juicer of my own.

It’s not the juicer I set out to buy. It’s been well used. It’s named after a retro fitness guru. (Although I do own a George Foreman Grill – maybe they can lift together.) And I need to use chopsticks to remove the blade because the former owner lost the tool. But the price was right, and now I have fresh juice whenever I want it. And for a lot less than the $6-7 a pop most juice bars charge.

There are a bewildering number of juicer options out there – masticating, single gear, twin gear. Spendy, super spendy, and “cost of a small car”. They all have benefits and drawbacks. Some work quickly and are easy to clean, but don’t get all the juice from your veggies. Some are very efficient but painfully slow. And some are just too far outside of most people’s budget.

In nutrition school I learned that the best juicer for you is the one you’ll use.

There’s nothing like a fresh green juice, bursting with the flavor of organic vegetables – and maybe a little fruit.

Here are some of my favorite things to juice – what are yours?

Apples help protect your bones, prevent cancer, and even promote weight loss. A little bit of their natural sugar can help regulate your blood sugar.

Beets are a juicy, delicious root with tasty greens. The root is rich in folates, potassium, B vitamins, iron, manganese, copper, and magnesium. The greens are full of vitamin C, carotenoids, and vitamin A. They help keep our mucus membranes and skin healthy, and boosts vision.

Carrots are full of antioxidants which can help prevent cancer. And the beta-carotene in carrots is converted to vitamin A, protecting our eyes and skin.

I cannot get the song Let It Go from the movie Frozen out of my head. It bursts into my head as I’m driving, walking, reading—even sitting on the toilet. Very apropos.

It also rears its pretty head when I come face to face with my bad habits.

The other night I was feeling a bit bored so I opened the pantry door for a snack: “Let it go, let it goooooo…” Ok, no snack.

Another night I was tired from work and didn’t want to go for a walk, so I plopped down on the couch with my book. “Let it go, let it goooooo, can’t hold it back anymore.” So, I guess I’ll talk a walk, right?

It’s like the ghost of bad habits past, haunting me.

Something I do need to let go is a little winter weight. It happens to all of us—when the weather gets colder, our bodies naturally slow down and crave carbs. Root vegetables, popcorn, homemade bread. What’s winter without them?

But now that we’ve let go of winter, it’s time for some spring cleaning.

When I thought about changes I could make to “Let it gooooooo…,” I thought of juicing.

Everyone is going gaga for them. All the usual suspects love them—cancer survivor Kris Carr, raw food activist David Wolfe, inflammation expert Dr. Andrew Weil , and Joe Cross, author of Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. Joe went on a juice fast for 60 days and lost a ton of weight, and now he makes his living off the movie and book. If that’s not inspirational, I don’t know what is. ;-)

If you’ve been over-indulging, they can help heal your digestive system while encouraging your liver, kidneys and gallbladder to release toxins. They also help restore your body’s PH balance. Foods like meat, fish, chicken, and grains have high acidic values. Vegetables are alkaline–they cancel out the acid and bring your body back into balance.

When should I juice?

You can juice any time of day, but morning and afternoon are best. Try one instead of your morning coffee or your afternoon snack for a natural energy boost.

A morning juice will wake you up naturally without caffeine. Have a big glass of juice alone to power through your morning. Or combine juicing with lean healthy protein like beans or eggs, some healthy fat in the form of avocado, chia deeds, flax seeds, or some almond butter, and a little carbs in the form of starchy vegetables. You’ll have everything you need to get you out the door and into your day. Adding a little something sweet, like a chunk of apple or pear, can help even out your blood sugar throughout the day.

An afternoon juice provides energy just about the time you’d reach for that snack. Try a juice with a little less sugar, like a carrot-beet combo or a green juice with kale, spinach, and a little pear. Add some kick with a smidge of cayenne powder or part of a jalapeño pepper.

What should I juice?

Fill your juices with fresh, organic super foods, including:

Apples help protect your bones, prevent cancer, and even promote weight loss. A little bit of their natural sugar can help regulate your blood sugar.

Beets are a juicy, delicious root with tasty greens. The root is rich in folates, potassium, B vitamins, iron, manganese, copper, and magnesium. The greens are full of vitamin C, carotenoids, and vitamin A. They help keep our mucus membranes and skin healthy, and boosts vision.

Carrots are full of antioxidants which can help prevent cancer. And the beta-carotene in carrots is converted to vitamin A, protecting our eyes and skin.

I have never been what you’d call a morning person. All through my school years I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to make it to the bus on time. In college I avoided morning classes like the plague. And as soon as I can swing it on a job, I migrate to a mid-morning start time. Like, 10:00 AM.

I am Queen of the Snooze Button. One time. Two times. Sometimes even three times I’ll hit it and fall instantly back into a heavy, dream filled sleep.

Until recently.

In what seemed to be a cruel twist of fate, last month I took a morning person job. I’d been warned going in. It was the best job I’d been offered in all other respects – good pay, reasonable expectations, a good match to my skill set, nice people. But I have conference calls as early as 6:00 AM. Every. Single. Day.

For the first few weeks this was torture. Dragging myself out of bed. Splashing cold water on my face. Stumbling downstairs to my desk. Turning on my PC. Making some green tea. Day after day, trying to turn my brain on in time for the call.

Somewhere around three weeks in I decided to cut back on caffeine.Even green tea. It was taking more and more each day just to get going. I needed to reset.

Someone—make that everyone—suggested hot water with lemon. And when I say everyone I mean everyone with an opinion about living healthy in the media. Martha Stewart talked about it on Dr. Oz. Gwyneth Paltrow wrote about it on Goop. It was on Livestrong.com and Mindbodygreen.com. You get the idea.

Hot water with lemon is a natural detox. It cleanses your liver and gallbladder, purging toxins and helping you process fat more easily. It provides a nice burst of vitamin C, chasing away icky cold germs. And it – ahem – moves things along in your digestive system, which is oh so helpful after a bit of indulging.

But what I didn’t expect is that it’s turning me into a morning person. Something about it, maybe the vitamin C, gives me a natural burst of energy—and a surprisingly pleasant disposition. Even a 7:00 am. (Not at 6:00 AM. I mean, come on.)

I am even starting to wake up *before* my alarm. It’s, well, alarming. I mean, who am I?

Give it a try. It is super easy. Just boil some filtered water, squeeze the juice of ½ lemon into your mug, and pour the hot water over it. Sip it throughout your morning, before you’ve eaten anything. That’s all there is to it.

Maybe you’ll become a morning person too! Or, at least, a little less crabby in the mornings.